ue not just for the period that the fully developed Barnes cult appeared, but almost from its origins in the struggle against Stalinism in the early 1930s.
One could argue that this was inevitable because of objective conditions. Whenever a group like the SWP attempted to engage in mass work it ran into the complete dominance of the left by the Stalinist Communist party. That fact is helpful in understanding what happened, but it does not change the fact of the SWP's dogmatic positions.
In the mid-1930s the SWP opposed the formation of a Labor Party in the United States. Nothing could have be more incorrect, since the rise of the CIO unions in the 1930s created the potential and a great deal of interest in launching a political party of labor. The failure, objectively, in United States history of such a party forming is one of the limiting factors on the labor movement today.
The blame for this failure falls primarily on the Communist Party and its Popular Front line, which was projected by Stalin to back the Democrats and on the Social Democrats, who also backed the Democrats. The SWP justified its anti-labor-party policy by counterposing a mass revolutionary socialist party to a labor party.
This confuses program with mass struggle in an idealist manner. The error is sectarian and similar to Lenin's error of opposing the Soviets. (Or of the DSP saying it does not advocate an Alliance like that of New Zealand but instead a more "politically correct "formation.)
Once the potential for the rise of a Labor Party passed, the SWP shifted to a position of advocating a Labor Party. In the early 1930s the SWP called Nicaraguan revolutionary leader Cesar Sandino a "traitor" to his people. This was explained with ultraleft arguments regarding Sandino's lack of a correct program, and so on. By the 1940s the SWP was opposing the proposal to vote an equal rights amendment (ERA) for women's rights to the US constitution. This was opposed as a petty-bourgeois proposal that working women were not interested in.
In the late 1940s, when the African-American nationalist movement began to grow, seeking to develop pride in its own community and culture, the SWP opposed it as a reactionary movement. In the late 1940s, when Farrell Dobbs had the first opportunity to speak on national radio to a large audience of the North American populace he brought them "greetings" from the Fourth International. In case anyone has any doubts, let me assure them nothing could be a more utterly sectarian approach to politics then to give a talk in such a manner, which had nothing to do with the realities of the North American people.
What this shows is how deeply imbedded sectarianism was in the culture of the SWP. In more recent times I could give a whole long list of positions, which most DSPers would quickly recognize as leftist or sectarian errors, since I lived the experience.
For instance when the civil rights movement exploded in the south of the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the SWP opposed its young members joining that living struggle. The explanation was made that we had the "correct program" and we needed to concentrate recruitment to our program rather than involvement in a struggle where we had no branches.
When the Vietnam War was coming to an end, the Vietnamese asked for world support in its effort to force the United States to the negotiating table. The SWP opposed the demonstrations that then ensued demanding the United States accept a negotiated peace settlement. When radicals in California launched an effort to establish a radical electoral formation called the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP), the SWP opposed it, denouncing the PFP as a liberal-bourgeois party.
The utter absurdity of that position was, of course, explained by looking at its platform rather than seeing the meaning and direction of the effort to launch candidates that would oppose the war in Vietnam and fight for social justice at home.
All of the above points occurred while James P. Cannon was alive. Cannon will go down in history as a giant for standing up to Stalinism and trying to keep alive the ideals of the early socialist movement, but Cannonism is not what the SWP literature claims: the Americanization of Leninism.
The SWP is not, nor has ever been, a Leninist party. It is absurd to think so, because it was always isolated from the working people as a social layer and as a movement. At best, it was a propaganda group that advocated the formation of a Leninist party, but existence was sect-like existence, and its political positions were ultraleftist or sectarian.
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Differences
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The culture that develops inside organizations with the we-have-the-correct-program view, as mentioned, never really allows differences although in the formal statutes it always claims ...
